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Israel Suspends MS Office Purchases For Now
case_igl writes "The Seattle Times is reporting 'that in an apparent showdown over price, Israel's government has suspended purchases of Microsoft Office software and is encouraging the development of an open-source alternative.' The Finance Ministry has cooperated with Sun Microsystems and IBM in designing the Hebrew-language version of OpenOffice software, a freely distributed open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The spokeswoman said the government was unhappy with Microsoft's refusal to sell individual programs from its standard Office package, which includes e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing applications. Microsoft representatives in Israel did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment." The Associated Press article is carried on many other sites as well.
More power to them! Microsoft Word's default Hebrew fonts are non-existent, and the alternative Hebrew fonts aren't very good. Nor are any of the office products very good at inputing right-to-left text. I hope the improvements to openoffice will make their way to other countries.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I'd like to see more countries do this. Hopefully it'll help convince businesses and people that Microsoft isn't the only choice.
Considering that Chinese (and many Asian languages) is traditionally written from top to bottom and left to right, it is probably in any software vendor's best interest to design their software allow text input in multiple directions. After all, Asia is a huge market.
Didn't Microsoft really embarrassed themselves awhile back when they demonstrated Windows/Office using traditional Chinese characters in China (which uses simplified characters)? I think that demonstrates that Microsoft needs to be much more detail oriented when localizing their software (or at least their presentations).
-B
Israel isnt the only country with a difficult language that isnt encouraging the use of MS office. Think the notoriously hard to learn languages and the fact that China, Japan and Korea are using Linux?http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200312/29/ eng20031229_131444.shtml
Maybe just maybe Microsoft are going to find it increasingly hard to sell to countries whose language doesnt not follow similar rules to english (american) grammar. It could become a strong point above many others for open source products. We need language to communicate effectively. If our OS does not provide a correct form of our language surely we will use one who does. Especially if its free!
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
I think what people fail to see in this argument, is that it really doesn't matter how the characters are oriented. It's all a matter of how they're displayed.
If you have:
AABBBCCCDDD in your memory, since that's the order in which the characters have been typed, the only thing you have to do is make your display routines in such a way that you write them 'on screen' from right to left.
For all the code involved in line checking, block operations, search and replace, etc, etc, it really doesn't matter how it looks on the screen, only how it's actually internally stored.
So the basic design of these Microsoft programs was faulty in that you can't define an orientation for the data you've used as input.
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
It seems to me that one of the reasons MS has always been able to create inconvienient packages from groups of software, and then sell at very high prices, is that they OWN most of the market. In other words, they're so big that you and I can't possibly expect to demand a concession.
Of course, now that countries are starting to realize that they're big enough to push back, we have more of a Goliath vs Goliath thing going on, and maybe MS will start to be more flexible in the way it offers its software. Maybe they'll start to consider adding a language pack when they stand to lose sales to an entire nation.
It'd be nice to be able, for instance, to buy Word and Excel without PowerPoint, Access, or FrontPage. (It'd be even nicer if Frontpage and everyone who contributed to it's creation were cast into Hell, but that's another story!)
In the height of the cold war, lets say you met and befriended a Russian. Lets say a thousand people did, lets say a million.... what what % of the population do these personal relationships make governments change policy? My guess is, it doesn't happen. When ideologies not only vary, but conflict to the degree Israel and it's neighbors do, personal relationships will have very little effect unless we're talking about the nation's leaders becoming buddies, which at the very least will facilitate more discussions. Of course those discussions will anger some sect will continue to launch terrorist suicide attacks which will of course, be retaliated for and the vicious cycle continues.
The problems in the middle east are complex, maybe too complex to solve today. My hope is the next generation of middle eastern will have more understanding and tolerance for one another, but then again, that generation will have lost fathers and brothers to the violence and will have thier own bones to pick.
I'm an admitted Apple addict (fan-boy, whatever...), so...
I installed OO.o for OS X the other day, and poked around a bit. Gotta admit, it isn't anywhere near as easy to use outa the box as either Office or AppleWorks, at least for me (got both installed). That said, I think it has a lot of potential, and I'm anxious to see what the Aqua-native version will bring. And the folks over at OO.o admit that it's not for the faint-of-heart, and recommend it only for geek-y types at this time.
I'd like to see Apple release an update to AppleWorks, for both Mac and Windows. I also think Apple should support Linux as well, and expect that they eventually will. The more competion that MS has, the better off we all are. It's not like MS can't make good software - Office v.X and Flight Simulator come to mind as examples of good products.
Anyways, hopefully MS will continue with their recent trend of seeking outside input (as with the questionaire sent to Linux users.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother.
... sniped somewhat biassed discription of Israel's politics ...
... But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this. FOSS is one venue for collaboration.
...)
This already happens. Israel's group of inux users mailing list has at least one Iranian participant. He is indeed respected personnaly.
The ONLY hope of peace is for enough people on all sides of the conflict to get to know eachother and develop personal respect. They don't have to respect eachothers' governments
You know, that mantra just doesn't work. In 1929, in Hebron, the jewish settelers were very well known and respected by their arab neighbours, which massacered them one day w/o any warning.
It is not the political system in israel which is responsible for the right's ascent, but a recognition that the peace process was nothing more than a national-scale con-job. The palestinians decieved israel, by promissing peace, while maintaining a constant, low intensity, level of murdering Israelly civilians.
The Oslo agreements and the resulting violence were nothing more than a result of the Israelly left's stupidity and blind-optimism whenever the word peace is involved, while confronted with a clever, hateful and murderous opponent (the PLO, later PA).
As for personal respect: the conflict is national, ethnic and religious.
In other words, it is a collective (social) phenomena.
It will, IMHO, no more be solved by personal respect of single people than any other war in the history of mankind (please show me a counter example
This was one of the false arguments laid by the Oslo people: let us reach for a temporary solution, the two people will get to know each other, and surely will respect each other so much that war will not be possible.
Well, guess what, it didn't work.
Working for necessity's mother.
Iran refuses Israeli humanitarian aid for earthquake victims.
Islamofascist mad mullahs would rather their people die than get help from Jews.
And you claim it's the Israeli political system that's paralyzed by peace because of the low margin for Knesset representation.
The spokeswoman said the government was unhappy with Microsoft's refusal to sell individual programs from its standard Office package, which includes e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing application
Perhaps the middle-eastern market is diffrent then the american one... but near as I'm aware you can still by Outlook, Word, and Excel seperatly. However, it makes little sence to as if you need two MS applications, you might as well buy Office. At least the american price is something like $200 for excel, $200 for word, and like $100 for outlook. The office professional edition is like $500 from buy.com, not sure about the SB edition, the upgrade is about $300 from buy.com.
Now... whether or not you can buy one copy of Office and install word on one machine, excel on another, and outlook on another is a little bit unclear to me. Back in 2000 I did actually ask microsoft about this, they... being tech support said "I don't know, sounds reasonable to me, but I don't know".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The hard work is right-to-left support, for which there is, potentially, a huge market - Arabic speakers. If you have Arabic working, Hebrew is much simpler (replace the font, disable context-sensitive-glyphs, and you're done).
Furthermore, Israel exports a lot of "bleeding edge" technology to the rest of the world. If Israelis don't use Microsoft, it will have noticable effects, especially with early adopters which are often also trend setters.